2016 Presidential Theme: Literature and Its Publics: Past, Present, and Future
The 2016 MLA convention will take place in Austin, and this year’s presidential theme is Literature and Its Publics: Past, Present, and Future. The tradition of presidential themes was started to allow exchange on a common topic across the many constituencies at our vast convention.
Who is the public for literature? This question is foundational to the work we do and to the state of our discipline and profession. Literature as a cultural category and a human activity, the place of literary studies in the humanities, the composition of the academic workforce, the Common Core State Standards Initiative—all these issues concern the MLA and involve a notion of our public.
This theme invites MLA members to consider the public face of all our objects of attention: literature and other kinds of texts, as well as film, digital media, and rhetoric. It encourages us to discuss how these objects move among the arts and how our field engages other intellectual disciplines; to reflect on literature’s past publics and speculate on its future publics; and to think about media, reception, audience, commentary, translation, and adaptation—and more—as ways of connecting to a public.
MLA members play an indispensable role in the common culture by bringing literary and other works to audiences. How is our work as teachers, historians, editors, and critics—above all, as interpreters—a public act? We are all public intellectuals. Everything we contribute—every reading, intervention, and argument—makes an implicit claim for the social good of our common enterprise. How can we engage not only one another but our readers, our allies in the interpretive humanities and social sciences, and our students and their families in renewing the case for what we do?
The questions before us are urgent now, when cultural and economic forces have put the humanities under pressure. The shocking state of higher education in our fields, where the professoriat is being eviscerated to make way for cheap and disposable models of teaching, should move us to think together about our public face. We must push back with vigorous, imaginative affirmations of the value (rather than merely the cost) of having a literate public.
Moreover, the 2016 convention will also be an occasion to share and discuss the most promising work in digital media that has a public orientation. At a moment when digital work in our fields—including online teaching and digital scholarship—can sometimes be treated as an end in itself, we should remind ourselves that new media offer remarkable ways of assembling our publics. As a discipline, we have scarcely begun to explore these possibilities.
I hope you will join me in Austin under our discipline’s uniquely big tent—the multifarious, challenging, and exciting MLA convention—as we think together about our publics.
Roland Greene
2015–16 MLA President